A New 9/11 Video Surfaces

The New York Times has obtained a previously unseen videotape, shot by a Czech immigrant, that shows the impacts of both airplanes as they plunged into the World Trade Center towers: A Rare View of 9/11, Overlooked. (Hat tip: speedster.)

They did not even see the pale fleck of the airplane streak across the corner of the video camera’s field of view at 8:46 a.m. But the camera, pointed at the twin towers from the passenger seat of an S.U.V. in Brooklyn near the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, kept rolling when the plane disappeared for an instant and then a silent, billowing cloud of smoke and dust slowly emerged from the north tower, as if it had sprung a mysterious kind of leak.

The S.U.V., carrying an immigrant worker from the Czech Republic who was making a video postcard to send home, then entered the mouth of the tunnel and emerged, to the shock of the three men inside the vehicle, nearly at the foot of the now burning tower.

The camera, pointed upward, zoomed in and out, and then, with a roar in the background that built to a piercing screech, it locked on the terrifying image of the second plane as it soared, like some awful bird of prey, almost straight overhead, banking steeply, and blasted into the south tower.

It was not until almost two weeks later that the worker, Pavel Hlava, even realized that he had captured the first plane on video. Even then, Mr. Hlava, who speaks almost no English, did not realize that he had some of the rarest footage collected of the World Trade Center disaster. His is the only videotape known to have recorded both planes on impact, and only the second image of any kind showing the first strike.

Here is a multimedia presentation with excerpts from the video. They were directly underneath the second plane as it flashed overhead, piloted by Islamic killers in an ecstasy of religious frenzy, undoubtedly shouting the name of Allah, carrying all those terrified people to the last moments of their lives.